MAVERICK is not a site for posting poetry. Maverick is a magazine with the highest artistic standards and a toothy editorial staff dedicated to the discovery and display of those most rare and vital poems: those which resonate soundly with the rich, original and visionary imagery, language and content that is the maverick impulse; the best and most important vein of the American poetic tradition. (See our Loose Canon)
MAVERICK seeks to place strong, cutting-edge work by emerging writers together with new work by established writers to create the first high-quality digital forum for the very best contemporary poetry.
MAVERICK's basic aesthetic principles are largely informed by the precepts of Modernism as delineated by Ezra Pound: The language of poetry "must be a fine language, departing in no way from speech, save by a heightened intensity (i.e. simplicity). There must be no book words, no periphrase, no inversions... nothing--nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say."
To this, we add the three principles Pound set forth in his essay "A Few Don'ts for an Imagist."
1) Direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective or objective
2) To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation
3) Compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, NOT of the metronome
Maverick takes these principles a step further by placing considerable importance on:
1) Voice: The voice of a poem should be strong, clear, original and uniform, both within a single poem, and from poem to poem within a poet's opus.
2) Content: Content should be pertinent to the human condition.
3) Time: A union should occur, a fusion between the present moment and some moment in the past or future. The reader should be able to straddle two separate moments; to touch the past and/or future in terms of the present, or vice versa.